I asked him about paints and brushes and he led me over to one of the tables, where a group of bottles and jars was neatly arranged along with what looked like a bunch of used bristle brushes. With some pride in his voice he told me what I was looking at.
“Ground pigments, all exactly similar to the ones Velázquez used in 1650; we have calcite to add transparency to the glazes, naturally. For yellow, tin oxide; for the reds, vermillion of mercury, red lake, red iron oxide; for the blues you have smalt and azurite. We’ve oxidized the smalt so it’s grayer than it would have been when it was supposedly painted on, so you’ll have to take that into consideration when you use it. Then the browns-brown iron oxide, ochre, manganese oxide. No greens-he always made his greens, as I’m sure you know.”
“Yeah, but what about the red lake? That’s organic. It can be dated.”
He grinned and nodded like he was acknowledging a dull but willing pupil. “Yes, that’s true, and he used a lot of it. We were able to locate a store of very old red cloth, and we extracted the dyestuffs with alkali. Spectrographically they’re from cochineal and lac, which is consistent with what your man used, and the carbon isotopes should give us no worries. The same for the blacks. We used charcoal from archaeological sites. They burned a lot of buildings in the Thirty Years’ War, and a lot of people too. And they can date white too, you know.”
I didn’t know, except that you had to use lead, not zinc or titanium, I knew that much, and he said, “Yes, of course, we use lead white, the so-called flake white, but now they can analyze the ratio of various radioisotopes in the lead and can date when the lead was smelted from the galena ore. Therefore we have to make our flake white from seventeenth-century lead, which we have done. The museums of Europe are full of old bullets and the churches are roofed with old lead. It is not so difficult. In the cellar there is an earthenware vat where we corrode the lead with acetic acid to make lead carbonate. We use electric heaters instead of burying the vat in dung, but that should not affect the authenticity. The pigment is a little coarse, but you can use that to good effect, as Velázquez did. Extremely poisonous, of course, signor, you must not point your brushes in your mouth. And as for these brushes, I think you’ll agree we have done well.”
He held up a jar with a dozen or so brushes of all sizes. I’d never seen any like them before; the handles were heavy, dark wood, and the hairs were tied into the ferule with fine brass wire.
Baldassare said, “These are on loan from a museum in Munich. Genuine seventeenth century, in case a tiny hair should slip out into the painting-we don’t want someone to say, oh, this badger died in 1994.”
“On loan?” I said.
“In a manner of speaking, signor. They will be returned when we are done with them.”
“Who did they belong to?”
“Attributed to Rubens, but who knows? Perhaps they are forgeries too.” A big smile, just like Franco’s, but with fewer teeth. Smiles all around this place, and it made me nervous.
He showed me the divan where I was going to pose my model, with the velvet draperies and bedclothes in the approximate Velázquez colors: red, a greeny gray, and white, all as naturally fibrous as could be. A heavy wood-framed rectangular mirror was standing against the wall.
“You have the model too,” I said.
He shrugged. “We have Sophia. And her boy. We can get another, but we would prefer to keep all of this work in the house, as a matter of security.”
So I asked, “Who’s Sophia?” and he looked surprised and said, “She served you your risotto this afternoon.”
“Oh, the waitress,” I said, and I honestly couldn’t recall what she looked like.
“Yes, she helps her mother, but she’s an artist. Like you.”
I said, “You mean a forger.”
A nod, a smile, an Italian gesture of the hand. “A forger is an artist. She does antiquities and drawings, small things, very good quality. The boy will pose too, you know, with the mirror. The Cupid. Naturally, in the faces you will use your imagination, we don’t want someone to say, you know, I saw that woman with that little boy on the Number Fourteen bus.”
I agreed that would be embarrassing, and then for the rest of the afternoon I watched him rub out the crappy Flight into Egypt.
He used flame and turpentine-and not just any turps, he used the kind I’d be using for the painting, real Strasbourg turpentine made from the resin of the Tyrolian silver fir. Terrific smell, a little Pavlov in there; when it hit my nose I couldn’t wait to get back to work. Fresco is neat but there’s nothing like oil, just the feel of it down the brush to your hand and the way it shines, rich and sweaty, and of course that smell. Baldassare was talking about varnish, how we’d use real mastic from Pistaccia trees, the finest Chios grade, prepared with that same turpentine.
“How are we going to age it?” I asked him, and he stopped cleaning and made that gesture of the finger to the side of the nose, indicating a secret.
“You will see, but first we do the painting, okay?”
The cleaning and the drying of the canvas took a couple of days, during which I wandered around the city, on foot and by public transportation. Franco offered to drive me anyplace I wanted to go, but I preferred to mooch around the city myself. I hadn’t been in Rome since I came with Dad at age ten. Obviously, it’s changed, becoming more like everywhere else.
I looked at a lot of pictures but I kept coming back to the Doria Pamphili and Velázquez’s Pope. Joshua Reynolds thought it was one of the best portraits in the world. Second that. The first time I ever saw it I was terrified and had nightmares about it for weeks afterward. “Innocent, my ass!” is what my father said, before giving me his usual close reading of the work. He was always going on about the inherent superiority of an oil portrait to a photograph, especially when the image was literally as large as life, as here. You don’t see many life-size photographs, and even when you see actors on the screen, larger than life, as the saying goes, it’s still not the same. There’s something about the human scale that finds a trigger in our brains, and this painting has the usual legends attached to it, of servants coming into a room where it was hanging and mistaking it for the actual man, bowing and so forth.
But its power comes from a lot more than scale, because a life-size Kodachrome print would be a joke. It’s not mere illusion, has nothing to do with those fussy little nature mort or trompe l’oeil paintings you see in the side rooms of museums, it’s its own thing, the life of two men, artist and subject interpenetrated, coming alive, the vital loom of a life in a moment of time-no wonder the servants bowed. And technically, the handling of the satin of the camauro and the manteletta and the dense fall of the rochetta, white but made of every color but white, and the rendering of the damp flesh of a living man-you can look at it for hours and digitize the fucking brushstrokes and penetrate it with X-rays, yet still at its heart there’s a mystery. All the balls he had to keep in the air at once, every brushstroke in balance with every other-and what strokes, exactly right, each one, and all perfectly free, loose, and graceful. I must be insane to pretend I can do this, is what I was thinking, to be absolutely honest, raving mad. And for gangsters too! I was starting to feel like the queen in Rumpelstiltskin: oh, sure, king, honey, I can spin straw into gold…
And at that point it struck me that the obscure names for his ecclesiastic garments had popped into my head as I studied them, and I was sure I had no idea what a rochetta was when I walked into the museum. I felt the hair stand up on my neck, and I left in a hurry, with a funny sense that something was on my heels.